Bechdel test and other media analysis about discrimination

[KyriakosCH]

As a moderator, I will remind people that as soon as we enter into aggressive/personal insults (regardless of position), or posts that are intended to simply provoke, action will be taken. There is a way to disagree with someone that doesn't involve belittling that person, or their beliefs, regardless of how passionate (or right) you feel in your disagreement.

It certainly wasn't my intention to provoke or belittle anyone. In the spirit of debate, I'll address TheFrighter's original question:

I think the Bechdel Test, like any critical tool, can be very useful as long as it isn't applied with a pedantic rigidity. What I find interesting about it is that it's a neat little way of testing how rounded the female characters in a story are. Do they have their own interests and concerns, or are they there to serve a male character's narrative arc? As Crimson Wizard said, I think similar tests are instructive in different contexts. Even in science fiction, how frequently do we see two aliens talking about something that doesn't involve humans? Or in Hollywood, two non-Americans speaking about something that doesn't involve Americans. It draws attention to the way even self-consciously progressive shows like Star Trek implicitly place certain people at the centre of the universe.

Usually in literature you get a majority of characters being there for purposes of juxtaposition to the main character(s). For example, someone may be hideous, to allow for the protagonist to be identified as more decent. It's in essence the same trick that (supposedly) was used to lure a girl, by paying someone to attack her and then defeating him (I mean I never used it, but maybe some people are into capitalist planning ).
Furthermore, a book where every character is their own thing, simply does not work. It's why art isn't a mimesis of life, but something inherently more poetic, and also why the more realistically-inclined authors rarely get to become famous or stand the test of time. Dickens>Collins etc.

[Honza]

So has anyone here actually used the Bechdel test or any similar rule? What changes did it bring to your story?

Also when you think of a new character, do they come with a fixed gender right away, or do you sometimes change characters' genders later?

[Blondbraid]

Usually in literature you get a majority of characters being there for purposes of juxtaposition to the main character(s). For example, someone may be hideous, to allow for the protagonist to be identified as more decent. It's in essence the same trick that (supposedly) was used to lure a girl, by paying someone to attack her and then defeating him (I mean I never used it, but maybe some people are into capitalist planning ).
Furthermore, a book where every character is their own thing, simply does not work. It's why art isn't a mimesis of life, but something inherently more poetic, and also why the more realistically-inclined authors rarely get to become famous or stand the test of time. Dickens>Collins etc.

I think I speak for the vast majority of women when I say the "paying another dude to fake-attack the girl so you can play the hero" is less romantic and more of a huge red flag showing the guy is willing to lie and manipulate people if it benefits him, and there are outright predators who stalk women and insist of walking after them even when they've said no under the guise of "following her home to keep her safe", and the fact that so many men still don't get how this might be creepy or immoral or treat it as harmless fun just proves that we need more stories that can help men learn to see women as people like themselves and not prizes to be won or fought over.

Again, not every story needs to pass any of the tests mentioned, the problem is when you have a huge number of authors with a big cast of several well-rounded characters, but the female characters are all shallow stereotypes who only exist to tell something about male characters (victims who only show up to demonstrate the bad guy is evil, random girls showing up to fawn over the hero to show he's handsome) is unfair and dehumanizing to women. Why is this so hard to understand?

So has anyone here actually used the Bechdel test or any similar rule? What changes did it bring to your story?

Also when you think of a new character, do they come with a fixed gender right away, or do you sometimes change characters' genders later?

Well, I've pondered the Behdel test when writing some of the dialogues for my games, but as I've mentioned before, with the nature of video game storytelling being different from film, it's harder to apply to video games where you play as a male protagonist because it's rare to feature two npc's talk to each other in a part integral to the story in most games, especially if you make a small indie adventure with a limited cast and cutscenes, hence why I think this test I posted would be more relevant to games;
1. A named female character (with an actual name, not a generic title)
2. Who has a full conversation with the player character/protagonist (more than two sentences),
3. And her conversation isn't about a romantic or sexual relationship with the player character

And I've tried to have most of the games I've made pass these criteria, the only exceptions being the first AGS game I ever made where I couldn't think of a name for the queen, a short game set entirely in a monk monastery, and a mags project where all characters were prehistoric animals without much dialogue at all, and I'm certainly not going to hold it against any other game makers here if they don't pass the criteria for similar reasons.

Now, I often come up with a character's gender right away, but that's mostly to do with the fact that I'm a graphics-oriented person and start with a visual image of a character before doing things like dialogue, plus it's harder to re-draw sprites than to change pronouns in text.

[KyriakosCH]

Fwiww, the "paying someone to attack a girl so you could save her" was a joke 

Also, as a writer I can tell you that while everyone who writes has his/her own style, you very rarely will see a story that has real-life autonomous characters, and even if you do chances are it won't be a good story. Unlike the real world, a story has a specific plot, climax, planning, deliberate diversion of the reader's attention so they don't see what is going to happen and a load of other literary elements. If you just focus on the characters being their own thing, you are highly unlikely to end up with something worth reading, imo

Then again, I actually have very few characters in my works, and the writers I like also do that.

[Blondbraid]

Fwiww, the "paying someone to attack a girl so you could save her" was a joke 

I know, but it's not something I've seen women joke about in such a manner, and most women don't think guys treating them as objects to manipulate is particularly funny, because if you're a woman, a guy lying to you to get your attention is too often a very real concern, not to mention having a guy pretend to be a would-be attacker would be absolutely terrifying to most women, especially considering many people can and do get PTSD from being assaulted, even if the attacker was fought off.
Whilst not quite as severe, I'll cite this blog post to try and paint a picture explaining it;

I read about the rift that began in SNCC during Freedom Summer, when during a training video on voter suppression, white workers started giggling at the fat Southern white dude on the screen. To them, he was a stereotypical representation of a laughable and ridiculous Southern character. To the black workers, he was a very real and very brutal enemy.

Also, as a writer I can tell you that while everyone who writes has his/her own style, you very rarely will see a story that has real-life autonomous characters, and even if you do chances are it won't be a good story. Unlike the real world, a story has a specific plot, climax, planning, deliberate diversion of the reader's attention so they don't see what is going to happen and a load of other literary elements. If you just focus on the characters being their own thing, you are highly unlikely to end up with something worth reading, imo

Again, there is a difference between writing "real life", and treating female character with the same depths as male characters.

No one is demanding every single female character should have a full real-life biography, but I'll explain again, if male characters can several personality traits and a role in the story outside of being "a guy", so should female characters. Female characters doesn't need to be super deep, but they shouldn't be reduced to "the girl" character. You can have a simple scientist character giving exposition be female, or make any of the background characters female, but so many writers fail even this low bar and have only one female character and she's a stereotypical love interest who is just there to be hot, and that sucks if you are a woman who wants to see women portrayed as human beings. How hard is this to understand? I don't know how to simplify this any further.

[KyriakosCH]

It's not hard to understand, it is just (imo) the wrong way to look at literature. Now if we are talking about some movie/tv show, it is more realistic to achieve that without ruining everything. But in literature you simply cannot prioritize autonomy of characters.
It's even relatively rare to see any decent book that has more than two protagonists; the rest are there for plot reasons or juxtaposition.

[Blondbraid]

It's not hard to understand, it is just (imo) the wrong way to look at literature. Now if we are talking about some movie/tv show, it is more realistic to achieve that without ruining everything. But in literature you simply cannot prioritize autonomy of characters.
It's even relatively rare to see any decent book that has more than two protagonists; the rest are there for plot reasons or juxtaposition.

Really? From my experience, in books, you have more time and pages to flesh out the characters, and a character doesn't have to be the protagonist to be an interesting and fleshed out character.

Take the Harry Potter books, whilst Harry is the protagonist, there are still several diverse and nuanced female characters in them, like Hermionie, Professor McGonagall etc, or if you want a classic example, Lady McBeth in Shakespeare's play McBeth
is a supporting character in a play with a male protagonist and a very limited number of characters, yet she's still praised as an interesting role with her own motivations and character arc.

If an author can't write nuanced or diverse characters for 50% of the population, that's a limitation on the author, not a limitation of literature.

[KyriakosCH]

It's not hard to understand, it is just (imo) the wrong way to look at literature. Now if we are talking about some movie/tv show, it is more realistic to achieve that without ruining everything. But in literature you simply cannot prioritize autonomy of characters.
It's even relatively rare to see any decent book that has more than two protagonists; the rest are there for plot reasons or juxtaposition.

Really? From my experience, in books, you have more time and pages to flesh out the characters, and a character doesn't have to be the protagonist to be an interesting and fleshed out character.

Take the Harry Potter books, whilst Harry is the protagonist, there are still several diverse and nuanced female characters in them, like Hermionie, Professor McGonagall etc, or if you want a classic example, Lady McBeth in Shakespeare's play McBeth
is a supporting character in a play with a male protagonist and a very limited number of characters, yet she's still praised as an interesting role with her own motivations and character arc.

If an author can't write nuanced or diverse characters for 50% of the population, that's a limitation on the author, not a limitation of literature.

I don't know about Potter so couldn't comment,
but Lady McBeth isn't there as a fleshed out character; McBeth himself isn't fleshed out either. LMcB serves very specific purposes in the plot, namely to push McBeth to take the place of the king. Later on she becomes mad, but it's not like any specific personality was there to wash out along with the damned spot.
In other words, you can think of her as the definition of a complementary character who is there for set reasons.

Edit: If you want theatrical characters who are -in a way...- their own thing, try your countryman (?) Strindberg  (I can't say I like his plays...)

Edit2: I really am not seeing what you are going on about "a limitation of the author". You can't be of the view that the major writers were that interested or even able to be socialites. I already alluded to the rather blatant (because they lived in the same era, and even knew each other) Dickens vs Collins thing: Collins is internationally almost an unknown, while Dickens is probably one of the two most famous writers of the UK.

[Babar]

So has anyone here actually used the Bechdel test or any similar rule? What changes did it bring to your story?

Also when you think of a new character, do they come with a fixed gender right away, or do you sometimes change characters' genders later?

I've often thought about doing a jokey little easter egg in one of my games where 2 female background character discuss someone called "Bechdel" or the like, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a game or two do that exact same thing.
The point is, as I think has been mentioned in this thread already, using the Bechdel test to check an individual game for discrimination or handling of female characters in media is not really useful. It's more about using it to see specific trends- an individual game/book/movie/tv show failing the Bechdel test doesn't mean anything. The vast majority of them failing it points to something wrong in the portrayal of women in media.

Personally (not that I've made all that many games), but when I'm writing out a game, I go back after the characters outlines are done and see if there's any reason I chose a specific set of traits for that character, and what would happen if I changed them.

Edit2: I really am not seeing what you are going on about "a limitation of the author". You can't be of the view that the major writers were that interested or even able to be socialites. I already alluded to the rather blatant (because they lived in the same era, and even knew each other) Dickens vs Collins thing: Collins is internationally almost an unknown, while Dickens is probably one of the two most famous writers of the UK.

I don't know if this analogy is better or worse for you, but I liken it to a game where you meet a guard whose two lines of dialogue are "Grumble Grumble, I am hungry, when is my replacement coming?!" and "Oh wow, thank you for the lunch buffet pass, can you keep an eye on my post while I go make use of it?!", compared to a game where you meet a guard character who is just sullen and snappy at you, who has a short angry dialogue with a pizza delivery lady when he can't pay her, who the butcher tells you used to come almost weekly to get a big juicy steak, but is coming less often now, who the banker tells you has an overdraft, and whose wife tells is always whittling horses for his kid.

I'd say if someone wrote the first rather than something like the second, it would be down to a "limitation of the author" (or of time or other resources).

[Ali]

Usually in literature you get a majority of characters being there for purposes of juxtaposition to the main character(s). For example, someone may be hideous, to allow for the protagonist to be identified as more decent. It's in essence the same trick that (supposedly) was used to lure a girl, by paying someone to attack her and then defeating him (I mean I never used it, but maybe some people are into capitalist planning ).
Furthermore, a book where every character is their own thing, simply does not work. It's why art isn't a mimesis of life, but something inherently more poetic, and also why the more realistically-inclined authors rarely get to become famous or stand the test of time. Dickens>Collins etc.

I think what you're saying is most often true of movies, games and folktales - where characters frequently do flatly perform structural roles. But 19th Century realism is dominated by writers who absolutely did devote page after page to creating characters who are, as you put it, 'their own thing'. Dickens is particularly renowned for his colourful and varied portrayals of supporting characters.

I love Wilkie Collins, but his 'sensational' novels weren't a great deal more realist (or realistic), so I don't think I understand the point you're making.

but Lady McBeth isn't there as a fleshed out character; McBeth himself isn't fleshed out either. LMcB serves very specific purposes in the plot, namely to push McBeth to take the place of the king. Later on she becomes mad, but it's not like any specific personality was there to wash out along with the damned spot.

I agree that Shakespeare isn't doing psychological realism - but it hadn't been invented. Moving the story forward and being a rounded character aren't mutually exclusive. Lady MacBeth has her own goals and concerns.

If I can contrast that with a very badly written character: Madison Paige keeps trying to help the protagonist of Heavy Rain even though he seems disturbed and violent and she has every reason to suspect he's a serial killer. She stays in his motel room and bandages his wounds and takes huge risks for him. Why? They just met and he's awful. But the story has only been thought through from the protagonist's perspective.

(I think, later on, it explains explain that she has some journalistic interest. But the game is happy to rely upon the players' assumption that she has simply fallen in love with Sketchy Joe.)

[KyriakosCH]

I'd say that Dickens has characters who are caricatures, not realistic. Collins has some more realistic characters, at least in his short stories, but despite becoming very famous in England, he is basically an obscure writer globally.
In writing nothing is really alive in the first place, so the characters are born as symbols and spend most of their life as that; they may change to be symbols of other things, of course.
But imo if a writer creates a character meaning to make them realistic and treat them as a person, this doesn't end well in the very confined and economic structure of literature.
Then again, who knows, maybe it's not unrelated to that that I detest Zola and think De Maupassant's dark period was supremely better than his previous run as a quasi-realist.

[Blondbraid]

but Lady McBeth isn't there as a fleshed out character; McBeth himself isn't fleshed out either. LMcB serves very specific purposes in the plot, namely to push McBeth to take the place of the king. Later on she becomes mad, but it's not like any specific personality was there to wash out along with the damned spot.

I agree that Shakespeare isn't doing psychological realism - but it hadn't been invented. Moving the story forward and being a rounded character aren't mutually exclusive. Lady MacBeth has her own goals and concerns.

If I can contrast that with a very badly written character: Madison Paige keeps trying to help the protagonist of Heavy Rain even though he seems disturbed and violent and she has every reason to suspect he's a serial killer. She stays in his motel room and bandages his wounds and takes huge risks for him. Why? They just met and he's awful. But the story has only been thought through from the protagonist's perspective.

(I think, later on, it explains explain that she has some journalistic interest. But the game is happy to rely upon the players' assumption that she has simply fallen in love with Sketchy Joe.)

Well, Lady McBeth isn't a realistic character, however, as Ali put it, she does have her own goals and concerns, she has a distinct personality and you can tell what her motivations are and why she does what she does.

And I couldn't agree more on Madison from Heavy rain, and what really bothered me throughout my playthrough

Spoiler

was that whilst all the male characters had clear reasons as to why they were pursuing the killer from the start, and all their scenes felt relevant to their characters and their suffering part of their individual character arcs, all Madison did was acting like a maybe possible love interest to Ethan, and all here scenes were full of gendered violence presented in a creepy voyeuristic way; random balaclava dudes bursting into her home to attack her(which was a dream sequence and didn't even affect the story), being caught by a  serial killer strapping her to a table and menacing her with his power drill, she has to play sexy to get near some mafia dude who then tries to force her to strip at gunpoint, and basically, nearly all her scenes felt like an excuse to put a fetishistic torture-porn scenario into the game in a way that none of the male protagonists were.

[close]

Anyway, KyriakosCH, I've always been taught that while you can't always achieve realism in all stories, a good writer should always strive to create the illusion that their characters are living people who happen to become part of the story and not just constructs only there to move the plot forward, and in my opinion, if the audience starts to feel that characters don't make sense and it very much feels like they only do something because the plot says so, or a character is only there to be a symbol of something, that story usually isn't a particularly well-told story.

[KyriakosCH]

Ok I certainly don't mean to antagonize (that has a place in writing, not forum posting ).
On my part I view anything in literature as interlinking relations anyway, so in that sense there is really only ever one character, and that one character is supposed to be a vehicle to carry the reader to some avenues of thought and/or emotion.

[Blondbraid]

Ok I certainly don't mean to antagonize (that has a place in writing, not forum posting ).
On my part, I view anything in literature as interlinking relations anyway, so in that sense, there is really only ever one character, and that one character is supposed to be a vehicle to carry the reader to some avenues of thought and/or emotion.

Well, from my perspective, if you only tell one type of story, centering on one character, there is a big risk that one's writings become samey, for lack of a better word, and some authors fall into the trap of only writing characters who comes across as self-inserts, but I've always been partial to stories focusing on several different characters, and I'd find it hard to write a compelling protagonist if the side characters around them were static and didn't have enough characterization to leave room for them too to change alongside the protagonist.

[KyriakosCH]

I mean that even if there are many characters, they are all one vehicle - they don't exist in the first place; they are symbols to allow you to travel in your own world of thought.
Which is also why I mentioned that having fleshed-out characters is more realistic a goal in movies/tv shows ^_^ (because then you start with actual people anyway; those playing the roles)

[Blondbraid]

I mean that even if there are many characters, they are all one vehicle - they don't exist in the first place; they are symbols to allow you to travel in your own world of thought.
Which is also why I mentioned that having fleshed-out characters is more realistic a goal in movies/tv shows ^_^ (because then you start with actual people anyway; those playing the roles)

Well, personally, I've seen plenty of live-action TV with less realistic characters than some of the greatest animated films.

Just, for example, I think Moses and Ramses in Dreamworks The Prince of Egypt are way more nuanced and fleshed out as characters than about 90% of the people in Bond movies.

But while I can agree that all fictional characters start out as a thought in one's head, if you don't work to bring them out into the world, they'll just stay as thoughts in your head.

[Ali]

I mean that even if there are many characters, they are all one vehicle - they don't exist in the first place; they are symbols to allow you to travel in your own world of thought.
Which is also why I mentioned that having fleshed-out characters is more realistic a goal in movies/tv shows ^_^ (because then you start with actual people anyway; those playing the roles)

I really don't see it that way - quite the opposite. Films last a couple of hours, whereas Brothers Karamazov is 800 pages long. The best film ever made can't (and shouldn't have to) compete in terms of depth of character. Of course Dickens uses caricature, but realist writers use exaggeration and grotesquery without reducing characters to floating symbols or levers that need to be pulled.

It's very easy for films to give the impression of realism, because they can use real people and naturalistic photography. I think this amplifies the problems the Bechdel test draws attention to - when a female character seems real, but actually acts in a superficial and highly idealised way.

[KyriakosCH]

I think that part of the reason Dostoevsky has rather impressively fallen from grace in the last 20 years, is that in his larger works he tried to present a semi-realistic group of characters. Of course, due to himself being rather peculiar, half of those are epileptic or verminous or caricatures or exist to have a specific showdown with someone else (say Satov, in the Possessed, which features a load of characters). I have read (in my late teens) his four main novels, but prefer some of his short stories, like the Dream of a Ridiculous person.
That said, I am not approaching the issue as a reader, but as a writer, so for me there are very distinct dynamics in what I personally do. Obviously no two authors are alike, but it is imo true that most of the classic authors, whose work remains for decades or centuries, are not known for realism in characters.
Then again, so-called realism is its own literary genre. I am personally not very interested in it; my favorite writers include Kafka, Borges, Poe, De Maupassant.

[Ali]

I'm not a particular fan of realism either, but I'm not sure what the relative popularity of Dickens and Collins, or Dostoevsky's declining popularity would tell us?

Most of the people here are writers of one kind or another, and we understand that characters have a structural role to play in narrative. But it's reductive to say that all characters are merely symbols, and it also allows writers to abdicate all responsibility. "You can't be upset about [crude stereotype] because that character was merely a product of my imagination!"

[KyriakosCH]

In the type of narrative that I am interested in (as a writer, most of all), the characters are symbols. That doesn't mean they come across as fake, but it means that they aren't there as figures in a documentary either. Perhaps it is better to give an example from a work by F. Kafka.
The Metamorphosis can be identified in various ways, you can think it is some kind of slightly altered realism (the protagonist was transformed into a beetle-milipede hybrid, but other than that the rest of the world seems generally realistic), but knowing Kafka (and his diaries) the story is very clearly an allegory about mental problems and the sense that you no longer are really human. None of the characters are "fleshed-out" in the way it is expected to in this thread ( ), for example:
-Gregor's sister is only there to become his antagonist and ultimately make him give up
-Gregor's mother is the only force of the world which tries to keep him attached
-Gregor's father is a manifestation of the risk of punishment or even destruction
-The people from his work have an even less subtle use: greedy opportunists who turn on him immediately and don't even believe he is sick.
-The three tenants are even more formulaic, have a leader and are a final nail on the coffin - as for the old cleaning lady, she is barely a character and is mostly some vile person who feels singular joy on account of Gregor's predicament because he is now in a way lower even than her.
All that is not what you'd see if you saw a documentary about mental illness or burdened people in families. And this is for the better, because such a documentary would never rise to the level of a classic work of literature